Next step.... UK to criminalize possession of Number Theory, Combinatorics, Probability Theory, Statistical Analysis Math Books. Special temporary licenses will be granted by your local Met Office to be allowed to read on Galois Theory.
Imagine this: someone doesn't like you and wants to harm you. They plant a USB stick with random data on it on you, or in your home. They call the authorities and tell a story about how you're colluding with terrorists, and the information you've been exchanging with terrorists is somehow in your possession.
The hard part would be to get someone to believe the story enough to get a search warrant, but if you're in a position of authority in the government, this isn't unreasonable.
Now the warrant is executed, your home is searched, and the USB stick is found. The data is examined, and the judge orders you to provide the means to decrypt it. Because you can't, and because the data is indistinguishable from real, encrypted data, the judge orders you held until you provide the keys.
Is this theoretical? No. It really could happen. The UK is a very, very scary place to be if you ever do anything that might piss off someone in power.
U.K. certainly is dangerous if you upset those in power.
(The first conceit of the story is that there were two Church-Turing Theses, and the second one would be so disastrous as public knowledge that it was immediately suppressed by Her Majesty's Government, known only to a select few and the folks they monitor and handle).
Politicians are idiots and the security services will play them like a fiddle.
From where, to where...
Still… I do hope even Texas bans some of those inappropriate uses of momentum. I do value the electrochemical impulses going on between my fellow meatbags' ears.
Obviously the intentions here are not to ban computations but devices doing computations that makes jobs of those people harder.
Heard of the coming war on general computation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Com...
It gets old quickly to claim that "they introduced DRM" kind of things as if those things were imposed from the top and didn't happen within the dynamics of the businesses.
(They were lobbied from the dynamic of the businesses that wanted to enforce those DRMs, though.)
I never got an illuminati vibe from him. No grand conspiracy. Except maybe an unreasonably small number of people with an unreasonably large amount of money and influence having unsurprisingly converging interests that cause them to lobby for more or less the same things…
Who's "they", in my mind? I would say the owning class. Capitalists. People who make money because they have money. People who own the means of production, either directly or through shares. Those have historically been quite a bit more sympathetic to Fascism than anything resembling Socialism. I believe they still are now. Why would they not, it's in their material interest to be.
Remember what happened almost a century ago in Europe: both the far left and far right were rising. What did "they" the owner class chose? Fascism of course: Socialists and Communists would have disowned them, and they couldn't have that. And in France at the very least they were right: they were disowned after the war, though only partially.
Nothing is scarier to me than a distant techno landscape where knowledge in irresponsible or irrational hands can be used for unimaginable horrors. Such extreme measures as censorship of undergrad STEM education would, in such a case, seem appealing to authorities.
Encryption offers table stakes for weaponization of math. I do, however, agree in spirit with your slippery slope arg